


wait for me

by middleheads



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Author Is Sleep Deprived, BAMF Tina Goldstein, F/M, Fluff, Insecure Newt Scamander, Mutual Pining, Protective Queenie Goldstein, Slow Burn, The Lake House AU, Ugh, but I hope YALL like it, i had a lot of fun writing this, im just really attached to mauler okay, insecure tina goldstein, its kinda tweaked, newt and tina have a correspondence, newt has a new house, newt's dad is an architect, newtina, queenie and jacob have a family, the lake house but in the 1920s and in the wizarding world, theseus is a Good Older Brother, they have a daughter called clary, tina's got her groove back
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-18 04:46:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15477981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middleheads/pseuds/middleheads
Summary: Tina doesn't notice anything peculiar about her house on the lake, not until the mailbox starts emptying itself and conjuring mysterious return letters.Newt is only here to finish his architect father's work on the house and move on to his magizoologist ventures, but the mailbox starts filling itself with notes and transporting his return letters to Merlin knows where.It takes a while for the both of them to notice that they live two years apart, and that the mailbox is a time-manipulating device that sends their letters back and forth in time.As their magical correspondence blooms into a passionate romance that defies the walls of time, they are left to question not only whether it is possible to run such an impossible race, but also whether their love for each other is worth waiting for.





	wait for me

**Author's Note:**

> hi guys! so this is officially my first multichapter fanfic and i'm a bit nervous tbh haha
> 
> i really want this to be enjoyable for you guys and just so you know, i'm a perfectionist AND a writer AND a student currently dying in school so please be patient with me :D updates maybe every week or two? but each chapter is pretty long (i think?? i hope??)
> 
> if you guys haven't seen the lake house YOU NEED TO GO SEE IT RIGHT NOW it's so good my heart literally aches when i think about it i just love that movie so much,, and when i first saw it i thought of what an amazing newtina au it would be, which is why i'm writing this now. hope yall enjoy reading it as much as i enjoyed writing it!!

**_1928_ **  

Tina shuts the front door and puts on her coat. She looks back at the house one last time, and then makes her way across the jetty to the shore. Mauler the kneazle follows at her heels, stopping suddenly to admire the koi fish in the lake water below. Tina turns back indignantly. 

“Mauler!” she calls. “Let's go!”

Mauler meows in protest and swipes at the fish. 

Tina sighs.

There’s a rusting metal mailbox planted in next to the jetty. Tina opens it, produces a handwritten letter from her pocket, and places it inside. She shuts the mailbox with a clang and raises the flag to an upright position. Mauler watches in what seems like amused curiosity before returning his attention to the water.

“Mauler, we really gotta go,” Tina repeats. “I’ll be late for work.”

Mauler pays no attention.

“Mauler!" 

She goes over and picks the little kneazle up, who squirms and squeaks in her grasp.

“There’s plenty more fish where we’re going,” she tells him. “Queenie’s recipe.”

And with a crack, they Disapparate.

Then the house is silent. 

Before the flag on the mailbox suddenly drops, like an invisible force lowered it.

 

* * *

 

**_1926_ **

_Dear New Tenant,_

_Hi and welcome to your new home and congratulations, etcetera. It’s a wonderful place, as you already know, and I’m sure you’ll love living here as much as I did. I’m the previous tenant by the way. The post office is forwarding my mail but I wondered if you could send anything that might slip through. My new address is below. Thanks._

_P.S. Sorry about the paw prints by the front door. They were there when I moved in._

Newt stared at the letter. As far as he knew, the house was almost brand new, let alone finished. It was a project his father had been working on since Newt was a child. It was a family holiday home for as long as he remembered, the house propped out of the lake on stilts, made of more windows than walls. It had a winding maple tree growing through the middle, its leaves brushing the ceiling inside. 

The location of the house was extremely desolate, quite literally the only form of civilisation for miles. It stood exotic for years, untouched by mankind in the middle of the woods in Dorset. Newt’s father never talked about renting it out to public nor did he ever mention that he would finish his work, so Newt had decided to come back to do just that.

He set his suitcase down beside the metal mailbox and moved to check the jetty that lead to the front door. It was dirty and cracking slightly, but there was no sign of any pawprints. 

He read the letter again.

“That’s strange,” he murmured to himself, then folded up the letter and stuffed it in his pocket. 

Must have been a wrong delivery.

 

* * *

 

**_1928_ **

“Excuse me- ” Tina starts, but the receptionist cuts her off.

“Just hang on one second, okay?” The woman returns to blabbering on the phone. 

“Sorry, I need to- ” Tina continues.

The receptionist absentmindedly waves her wand and conjures a sheet of paper on the desk in front of Tina.

“Fill that up for me, will ya?”

“I’m not a client!” Tina blurts out in exasperation. “I’m a reinstated Auror, I used to work in the Wand Permit Office downstairs.”

The receptionist peers at her and finally puts the phone down. “Name?" 

“Porpentina Goldstein,” Tina states. 

“Oh yes,” says the receptionist, rifling through a folder. “You helped in the arrest of Gellert Grindelwald a week ago, didn’t you?”

“Yes, that’s me,” Tina says, trying to sound more polite than proud.

“You’ll need to find Percival Graves. He should be around here. Older man, kinda grumpy-” the receptionist drones.

“I know who he is, thank you,” Tina cuts in.

A while later, she finds herself trying to keep up with Graves’ large strides as they make their way down the MACUSA corridors. Graves hands her a large stack of files. 

“You’ll be covering eleven cases,” he says stoutly, and Tina looks aghast. 

 _“Eleven?”_ she asks in disbelief.

“It’s a quiet morning,” Graves admits. “If you get into trouble you can call for me, but try to keep it to a minimum. We all have things to do, don’t we?”

Tina looks a little dazed as Graves makes away in his long strides again.

 

* * *

 

 **_1926_ **  

The door to the bakery chimed as Newt pushed it open.

“Afternoon!” a short, plump man hurried out from behind the counter and greeted him brightly in an American accent.

“Good afternoon,” Newt offered a weak smile.

“You’re not from around here,” the man noticed. “I haven’t seen you before.”

“No, I’m from London,” Newt said. “You’re not from Dorset either, are you?”

“Nah,” said the man. “I’m from New York. Jacob Kowalski.”

He held out his hand. Newt shook it politely. 

“Newt Scamander,” he said. “My father built the house on the lake, just down by the shore. I’m here to finish building it.”

“Ah,” said Jacob dreamily. “My wife wanted to rent it a few years ago, but we heard that it ain’t finished. It’s a work of art, that one.”

“Well, maybe I could arrange your accommodation once I’ve finished patching it up,” Newt admitted, while picking out a few pastries for the day ahead.

“That would be great!” Jacob clapped his hands together delightedly. “Ya hear that, Queenie?”

A woman in her twenties with short blonde curls shuffled out from the storage room behind the counter. She was very pretty, and very clearly pregnant. 

“This gentleman offered to rent us the lake house once he’s done with it,” Jacob explained. 

Newt looked bashful as he set his tray of assorted pastries on the counter.

“That’s wonderful news!” Queenie’s features lit up in a dazzling smile. Then she gasped. “I love your idea to open up the ceiling! That tree needs space to grow. An Extendable Charm would work just fine,”

Newt was a little taken aback.

“You’re… a Legilimens,” he realised.

Queenie nodded, patting her rounded belly thoughtfully. “Although I do have trouble reading your kind. Brits. It’s the accent.”

Newt glanced at Jacob. “Then… are you a wizard too?”

Jacob finished packing Newt’s pastries and sighed. “Man, I wish I was. I wouldn’t have had to pack these by hand.”

He handed Newt the paper bag of pastries.

 

* * *

 

 **_1928_ **  

Tina Apparates right in front of her sister’s apartment. As soon as she regains her balance, Queenie opens the door, carrying her two-year-old daughter Clary.

“Please don’t ask,” Tina groans, and brushes past her sister into the house.

Mauler yowls and leaps at her as soon as she enters, clawing excitedly at her trousers. Tina catches him and sets him aside.

Queenie shuts the door rather pointedly. “You know I don’t have to ask to know how your day went.”

“Don’t read my mind,” Tina digs into a cabinet in the kitchen. “It was awful.”

Tina pulls out a jar of mouldy biscuits and sniffs it. Queenie moves over and confiscates it. “This is why you need to stop having hotdogs for lunch. It’s not wholesome."

“What do you suggest I do instead?” Tina sighs. “I barely have time to sleep. Eleven cases a day!”

“There’s strudel in the fridge,” Jacob lumbers out from the bedroom in a dark blue dressing gown.

“You’re a life saver,” comments Tina, and starts scouring the fridge.

“Look at your aunt,” Queenie whispers to Clary, who giggles. “Ravenous little beast, isn’t she?” 

“Don’t call me that,” Tina says, not unkindly, but begins devouring the whole strudel without even bothering to cast a heating spell.

“Oooh,” mocks Queenie in a singsong voice. “Bossy.”

She places Clary on the floor and the little girl crawls onto Tina’s lap to steal a sliver of cold strudel. Tina can’t help herself but smile.

 

* * *

 

**_1926_ **

Newt Apparated right in front of the lake house, returning from the bakery with his suitcase. He nudged a loose wooden plank of the jetty. It shook dangerously beneath his foot.

_I guess I’ll have to fix this first._

Newt set his case down and pulled out his wand. 

“Reparo!”

The jetty knitted its cracks together and fixed itself firmly into the stilts supporting it over the lake. Newt opened his suitcase and summoned a small bucket of brown paint from inside. It rose out of the case along with a large paintbrush. 

“Right,” he muttered to himself, and rolled up his sleeves.

He spent the next few hours painting the jetty a fresh coat of brown. He was halfway done when an excited yelp sounded from the shore’s end of the jetty. For a horrifying second Newt thought that one of his beasts had escaped from his suitcase, but he whipped around to see that his case was still tightly shut and there was a stray, wild kneazle sniffing at it.

“Hello there,” Newt said to it, placing his paintbrush down carefully, trying to mask his excitement.

The kneazle’s ears perked up and stared at him for a long moment. Then it leaped over the case and right onto the wet paint of the jetty. 

“Wait- ” Newt tried to grab it but it raced past him and right through the open door of the house.

He looked at the jetty in dismay. There were now a trail of pawprints across the second half of the jetty, ruining hours of hard work-

Hold on a second. _Pawprints._

Newt almost fell over the railings of the jetty and into the water in his haste to find the letter he’d found in his mailbox earlier that morning. His overcoat was lying on top of his suitcase on the edge of the shore.

“Accio letter!”

It whizzed out of his coat pocket and into his hand. 

_Sorry about the paw prints by the front door. They were there when I moved in._

Newt stared at it until he lost count of how many times he ran the words through his head. It couldn’t be possible.

Newt looked back at the kneazle, padding gleefully around inside the house. Then he turned around and his gaze landed on the mailbox on the shore.

A possibility hit him like a freight train emerging from a tunnel.

 “Merlin’s beard,” he whispered.

**Author's Note:**

> that's it for now! i hoped you liked it enough for you to want to read more! if not, here's a little sneak peak of chapter 2:
> 
> Tina thinks that her first day was just about as unwelcoming as it gets. She’s quick to find out she’s never been more wrong.


End file.
